Payment of royalties to SCF for music played in professional offices

In its Order No. 2468 of February 8, 2016, the Court of Cassation ruled that professional firms are not required to pay rights holders the compensation provided for under Articles 73 and 73-bis of the Copyright Law. The Court addressed a case in which SCF – Società Consortile Fonografi (hereinafter “SCF”), which engages in collecting activities in Italy and abroad as an agent for the management, collection, and distribution of the rights of member phonogram producers, had sued a dental practice, arguing that the broadcast, in the background, of phonograms subject to copyright constitutes communication to the public under Italian copyright law, as well as under international law consistent with EU law, and was subject to the payment of fair compensation, to be determined in a separate proceeding. In practice, according to SCF, professional practices were required to pay copyright royalties. 
The Court of Cassation, however, ruled the opposite. This is a particularly important ruling regarding the concept of the right of communication to the public, which triggers the obligation to pay copyright royalties, especially considering that SCF had prevailed in both the first and second instances before the Court of Milan. The Court therefore ruled that the notion of “the public” referred to in Article 3(1) of Directive 2001/29 on copyright concerns an indeterminate number of potential recipients and, moreover, encompasses a rather considerable number of people (Judgment of the Court of Justice in ITV Broadcasting).
This concept cannot, in fact, be applied to a professional practice such as a dental practice. The Supreme Court also clarified the role of the Court of Justice’s judgments in our legal system, arguing that such judgments serve as an additional source of EU law, not in the sense that they create new EU rules from scratch, but rather in that they clarify their meaning and limits of application, with binding effect on all within the Community. 
From this perspective, the Court also rejected, in an extremely clear manner, the claims of constitutional violations raised by the SCF and the possibility of appealing to the Court of Justice, deeming them manifestly unfounded, and also ordered the consortium to pay the legal fees.